Hrant Dink Commemoration Ceremonies Begin
The commemoration ceremonies of AGOS Newspaper Editor-in-Chief Hrant Dink started in front of Sebat Apartment on the 16th anniversary of his death.
Commemoration ceremonies started in front of the Sebat Apartment Building before the 16th anniversary of the death of AGOS Newspaper Editor-in-Chief Dink. A commemoration ceremony will be held in front of the Sebat Apartment Building, where the former headquarters of the newspaper is located. A crowd began to form in the area where the commemoration ceremony would take place. Police teams took extensive security measures in the surrounding area. While steel barriers were placed at the entrance of Halaskargazi Street, police teams scanned the citizens. Some roads in Şişli were closed to traffic.
Who is Hrant Dink?
Hrant Dink was born in Malatya in 1954. His father was born and raised in the Gürün district of Sivas, and his mother, Gülvart, in the Kangal district of Sivas. Her parents divorced after moving to Istanbul in 1961. Hrant and his two brothers were placed in the Armenian Orphanage in Gedikpaşa.
Meanwhile, Dink was influenced by the leftist politics that developed in Turkey and started to engage in politics along the Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist line. In those years, he changed his name to Fırat with a court decision in order to prevent the organization and the Armenian community from being associated.
He received his high school education at Surp Haç Tibrevank Armenian High School. After graduating from high school, he studied zoology at Istanbul University, Faculty of Science. After a while, he married Rakel, with whom they grew up in the orphanage.
While continuing the printing and stationery business he opened with his brothers, he started to manage the Tuzla Armenian Children’s Camp, where orphans and poor children from Anatolia like himself grew up, together with his wife Rakel. The state captured the camp 21 years after it opened. He did his military service as a short-term private in the Denizli Infantry Regiment for eight months.
He started his writing career by writing book reviews for some newspapers. His name began to be heard with the corrections he made to the false news in the press. He suggested the Istanbul Armenian Patriarchate to publish a newspaper in Turkish and Armenian for this purpose and said, “Armenian society lives in a very closed place, if we explain ourselves well, prejudices will be broken.”
He was the founder, editor-in-chief and editor-in-chief of the newspaper Agos, whose first issue was published on April 5, 1996. Apart from Agos, he wrote for Zaman and Birgün newspapers. Underlining that every ethnic community in Turkey should live in peace in his articles, Dink said that the Armenian community should also have a civic center other than the patriarchate. SOURCE
